S.I.N. Schematic
"It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits - like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits - involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding - inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is for ever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitability of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention". Malcolm Muggeridge.
Scrutineer’s Investigation into Narrative
Project #001: Schematic Sequence
A Fine Art Project made up of 49 canvasses, each measuring 1 metre x 1 metre. The Artist seeks validation through a process of reason and example. The construction of a narrative through a series of single images.
The grid: Seven Rows of paintings, with seven columns. Forty-nine pictures, with one image sitting in the dead centre.
Work in Progress: Insurrectionary Behaviour within the Family
Collections of Seven:
- Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Violet
- Chastity, Temperance, Charity, Diligence, Patience, Kindness, Humility
- Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Infancy
- Childhood, Lover, Soldier, Justice, Old age, Dementia
- Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Pride
- Ear, Eye, Nostril, Mouth, Nostril, Eye, Ear
Influences
The project nods at several influences:
Hogarth’s satirical etchings drawing on Greek mythology, (esp. Orpheus and the Underworld. The Rock of Sisyphus). The story of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott.
The narratives that weave their way through the images and the schematic employ themes of:
All that rises, and all that falls, the bitterness of Love – Hate. The mongrel as a metaphor for working class. A moral compass not drawn from religion, but from instinctive and memetic codes of practice. Conformity. The Asch Experiments. The idea of The Beaten Track. Quest stories.
Self-Schema
The term self-schema refers to the beliefs and ideas people have about themselves. These beliefs are used to guide and organise information processing, especially when the information is significant to the self. Self-schemas are important to a person’s overall self-concept.
Once we have developed a schema about ourselves there is a strong tendency for that schema to be maintained by a bias in what we attend to, a bias in what we remember, and a bias in what we are prepared to accept as true about ourselves. In other words our self-schema becomes self-perpetuating. The self-schema is then stored in long-term memory and both facilitates and biases the processing of personally relevant information.
The Hogarthian Project: Marriage a la Mode
‘Marriage A-la-Mode’ was the first of Hogarth’s satirical moralising series of engravings that took the upper echelons of society as its subject. The story starts in the mansion of the Earl Squander who is arranging to marry his son to the daughter of a wealthy but mean city merchant. It ends with the murder of the son and the suicide of the daughter.
Marriage A-la-Mode: No.1 – The Marriage Settlement, No.2 – The Tête à Tête, No.3 – The Inspection, No.4 – The Toilette, No.5 – The Bagnio, No.6 – The Lady’s Death
The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats – an allegory to describe the atmosphere of Post-War Europe.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
It is SO exciting.
[...] self-initiated schema gave me a diagrammatical device for placing ideas in rows and [...]